I kept forgetting to post my concept and reference sheets for my entry in the Riot creative challenge. I’ll be doing both a stylized entry and a more traditional fx entry. I ran out of time the last go around, so I’m super hyped it popped up again now that I have time and more experience 
For my stylized I’ll be doing and Arcade Skin theme for Ashe’s uli. I don’t have much sketched up for the concept atm since my tablet at home isn’t working, but I’ve already started on the project so I’ll post WIPs soon and look forward to any feedback I get.
For the Arcade skins, the colors relate mainly to the champion’s default skin color, which for Ashe is mainly blues and the gold trim in her clothing. Every Arcade skin uses flashy and varying colors as well, so my first pass I’ll add in complementary colors for the “pixel” bursts. For my effects, I’m going to branch out to colors on either side of the blues used in the color wheel, so the primary elements will include teals and some purples in addition to the traditional Frost color scheme.
Almost all textures emulate pixel art, and even the impacts have animated pixel flares. Upon frame by frame breakdowns though, there are still traditional multi color light ray flares, soft trails and glows to help fill out and brighten the effects up. For the animated flares and other flipbooks, the speed is quick but the frame flipping is stepped to mirror the small number of textures they could use in the first days of games, so I’ll be sure to keep that in mind. I tried to grab the best animated textures and put the frame-by-frames next to one another for reference.
The rest of my reference was of Ashe’s most recent skins, as I believe they best represent the philosophies and workflow they have been establishing for all their new champ effects (Broken down in their style guide). I tried to do as many side-by-side comparisons to find the commonalities in Arrow and AOE size, as well as the general bounds and composition of the secondary elements.
I’m looking forward to sharing the assets I put together tonight soon as well.
